Taxes

No taxes on overtime extra pay: overtime is the 'worker sacrifices when they work less' possibility in https://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/2026/04/encouraging-people-to-work-less-in-way.html.

Criticizing people who want to raise taxes: maybe the conversation is wrong. Instead of saying the purpose of taxes is to avoid more borrowing, people could change to saying that the purpose of taxes is to destroy money that would cause inflation, by taking money from people as fairly as possible. Any conversation about taxes that avoids the topic of inflation is vulnerable to people criticizing the taxes because they don't connect the issues.

Why care about inflation at all? Any government that issues its own money could just eliminate all taxes and accept higher inflation each year. For example, the European Union could give the governments of the 21 countries of the Eurozone money each year so that they would not need to have any taxes. (I was not sure if any states of the EU did not use the Euro after the UK left, until I just looked it up. I am just using information that I learned in the process of writing that sentence.)

(One reason is the cost of making new currency. If there is 2500% inflation over the course of a century (25^(1/100)=1.033 increase per year or 3.3% inflation), so that a US quarter has the purchasing power that a penny once did, do we get rid of all coins smaller than a quarter and use quarters the way that pennies were once used? Quarters are physically much larger, and using a large coin instead of a small coin is a waste. But let's disregard this reason and say that everyone uses digital currency.)

The reason not to do this is the difficulty of determining how to fairly distribute printed money. The EU is a good example. Maybe some countries currently tax 50% of all private income, while others only tax 20%. (Search for "eu tax burden wiki list" gives Tax rates in Europe and List of countries by tax rates, which don't seem to give the overall tax rate. Best would probably be to just look at government spending as a percentage of all spending: Government expenditure, percent of GDP, List of countries by government budget#International_Monetary_Fund. Germany 49%, Norway 48%, France 57%, Ukraine 71%, Netherlands 44%, Bulgaria 37%, China 33%, southern Korea 23%, Thailand 23%, Indonesia 17%.)

So if one country taxes 60% of income (let's say $30k per person, so I don't have to type €), and another taxes 20% ($10k per person), is it fair to give one country $30k per person so they can reduce taxes to zero, while giving the second country just $10k per person?

You could say, "give every country the same money per person. They can still have taxes if they want, on top of that." Like how individual US states cannot go into debt ("Most U.S. states are required by law to balance their budgets. Vermont is the only state without a balanced-budget requirement. States cannot run fiscal deficits like the federal government. Raising debt typically requires legislative or voter approval."), so if they want to spend more, just printing money is not an option.

But this removes effort. With taxes, and no equal distribution by a money-printing bank: a country that manages to produce five times as much can afford to consume five times as much. If every country gets $100k of printed money per person per year, then a country that produces $50k in value per person per year can only consume 50% more than a country that produces $0 value per person per year.

Try to measure the value that people create, and award money based on that: countries have an incentive to lie. Make up some statistics and say that each person creates $1 million in value per year. Without taxes, rewards become disconnected from reality. With taxes, if $1 million of value is being measured, then $1 million is subject to tax.

To people who don't do much thinking, this may all seem somewhat abstract: we are not in a situation where there are no taxes. This is all about explaining why are aren't in that situation even after money stopped being supported by gold (allowing governments to print unlimited money), and why there is a need to destroy money with taxes even though everyone complains about taxes.

I just overheard a sound bite because I wasn't focused on writing, and someone was just saying that stopping commercial traffic is piracy. VENEZUELA OIL TANKERS MUCH? If Iran stopping oil tankers and possibly confiscating them is piracy, how is the US stopping oil tankers and possibly confiscating them not piracy? 

With something like this, it's important to realize that the contradiction is not noteworthy; it's just people being inconsistent and not thinking about all possibilities. Just like people who are not good at chess not seeing all the possibilities from a move and therefore not playing as good as a better player.

Ellie retweeted this: https://nitter.net/InnaVishik/status/2044537696576803056

There are plenty of people who studied computer science on their own and became good at it.

These pages look like they will change in the future, to update to newer years:

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-growing-occupations.htm

If the only job you can get is as a Home health and personal care aide (14% of net new jobs, or 3.4 times as much as the next largest category, Software developers), it doesn't matter if you spent three years learning differential calculus from online resources.

Why do people care what college someone went to? What skilled job is in a shortage in the US that does not have countless people from poorer countries who would want to come to the US to do that job?

CMV: Large-scale unemployment is not a knowledge problem that would be fixed by everyone being more educated.

In the linked tweet, Inna Vishik said, "the structure/accountability of a college environment is crucial for learning anything challenging". The existence of self-taught CS workers is a counter example. CS has historically been a rapidly changing field: there was a joke post I read a few years ago about all the new things someone would need to know in order to do a simple web-related development task. So it can be hard for colleges to keep their curriculum relevant, and so a degree becomes less valuable as an indicator of knowledge.

Whereas math does not change. The joke with physics is that Science Makes Progress Funeral by Funeral: it changes, but slowly. So a degree will definitely be relevant, and so it's easier for employers to make the decision to disregard applications that don't come from someone with a college degree.

For other difficult things, like learning a new language, plenty of people are successful without spending most of their time in formal education.

The quoted tweet, from Dmitrii Kovanikov, is implying that people who do not learn all the free knowledge are less capable. It is not a very useful observation; someone might, at best, use it to convince themselves that it's fine to ignore problems that affect stupid people, the poll that Greta probably did not create.

Encouraging people to work less in a way that benefits society

Some people might not understand the need for the last part of this phrase: "in a way that benefits society." There are ways of encouraging people to work less that do not benefit society, which is a detail which is sometimes lost in questions like "does it help poor people when rich people work less?"

First: can it be helpful to society at all if people work less? Biggest reason to think the answer is no is war. Iran was just fighting the US and Israel. The fighting stopped; a day ago, US President Trump posted a promotional picture for a fighting match between two people. Is this relevant? Question: does it matter if the world thinks Iran won the fighting against the US, which Iran's leadership council said is not over? (Israel also played a role of course, but the US spends much more on military than Israel, and it's likely that the US sank the majority of Iranian naval vessels etc. Basically all I know is that Trump mentioned an island, so I looked it up on Wikipedia, and Iran uses it to export oil, and the article mentioned strikes by the US on the island; not strikes by Israel. The US has aircraft carriers, Israel doesn't.)

If it does matter whether the world thinks the US lost the war, presumably by being overwhelmed by cheap drones, then the war is like the martial arts match, which is held to determine a winner, I think (I have no interest in watching people hit each other and so I can't say whether people care more about the action than the results).

So: other possibilities in which people work less, and why they would not benefit society. (These are basically ways that other people have thought of, without thinking of this idea.)

Possibility: there is no unemployment. Actually making a plausible scenario for this condition is hard. Suppose a rule, "rich people must spend as much money per year as they earn, or they will be executed." Not realistic because in reality, people like to save money during part of their lives, then spend it when they get older. People also like to give money to their children. So, are rich young heirs forced to work, so that there is no unemployment? In general, an economy is likely not to be perfectly balanced so that there is absolutely no change in any macroeconomic indicators, like percent of wealth held by the top 10%, from one year to the next. If wealth is increasing, then even if there is no unemployment at one point in time, it would arise in the future, if a scenario is simulated for thousands of years.

We just ignore that and say that there is no unemployment. If there IS unemployment, then if people work less, then it allows other people to work, which reduces unemployment, which drives up wages. This is basically the case no matter what the details are regarding people working less. So it becomes harder to show that people working less in this situation helps society. If any methods show benefit under this condition of no unemployment, they will show a larger benefit if there is unemployment.

Possibility: welfare. People quitting work and just collecting welfare, paid for by rich members of society. By many metrics, society would be improved by this: if you exclude the people who are deliberately not working and who are collecting welfare, then more people can find jobs, because someone has to create the value which is consumed by the people on welfare. But on a fairness metric, this is worse: it does not benefit society. Someone who doesn't care about fairness, or who believes in an ancestral debt that can only be paid off by welfare, might disagree and say that it does benefit society.

Possibility: people who value their time highly, and value more money lowly, make a sacrifice in working less time. Example: someone who works 60 hours per week and makes $2 million per year reduces their work load to just 40 hours per week and makes $1 million per year. They have to work 33% more to make $1. Maybe this increases the time they spend with their children from 1 hour per week to 10 hours per week, a 900% increase, and they feel it's worth it. But it doesn't benefit society for them to do this. Natural assumption is that if they are working 67% of the hours, they are still providing 67% of the value to their company. Informed conclusion is that they are still providing even more than 67% of the value, since people are less efficient when they work more, though the actual relationship between time worked and efficiency while working probably has a peak (like with the model of, 'efficiency is quadratic due to a split between information gathering and decision making, with the value of decisions being directly proportional to the information gathered').

So if they are providing 67% of value, while earning only 50%, then the company is earning more. Even if they're making $1 million per year, most stocks are held by rich people, and it's reasonable to say the higher profits for the company go to rich people. Result: higher inequality. If rich people have more, then poor people have less; if everyone has more money it's just called inflation. This first-order effect is bad for society, and the second-order effect of "creating a pattern for other people to follow" is also bad for society. If one worker is willing to sacrifice and work more for lower wages, then companies will expect other workers to do the same.

Possibility: no sacrifice, people just work less with a proportional reduction in wages. The $2 million per year worker goes to $1.33 million when they reduce their hours per week from 60 to 40. In reality, people tend to work based on how they are paid, with exceptions for stupid people who don't realize when they're being paid more than other people who are doing the same amount of work.

So if the worker is being paid 67% as much, then they will only try to do 67% of the original work. They might 'accidentally' do more, just as when they are only getting paid 50% as much (and still looking at being granted the option of doing this as a favor from the company), but they won't feel an obligation to do so.

As the middle option, that seems like it's being fair to all involved, it can be hard to see why this is bad for society. It's basically only bad because it's not stable. There is nothing that makes it particularly attractive, either for the company or the worker, and so not many people would do it. All it really does is exist as what seems like an acceptable solution, which prevents people from looking for a better solution. If unemployment exists, then people working less in this way does reduce unemployment, but people often talk about things like the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, which is basically an excuse to ignore all the young people who can't find jobs despite a low birth rate: an excuse because inflation can't happen, or eventually ends, without the first step of printing money. So if people don't see reducing unemployment beyond a certain point as important, then the benefits to society from people working less in this way cease.

Possibility: people work less but are paid the same amount. Workers say they want this but it provides no benefit to a business. Like with welfare, it's a solution that involves conflict: one side benefits, while another side receives net harm (as opposed to just a smaller benefit). Conflict rarely generates solutions better than the best possible solution that doesn't involve conflict.

Possibility: instead of getting people to work less, businesses find ways to get people to work more. This increases unemployment and also increases inequality, because people won't demand wage increases in proportion to the amount of work they do.

The final possibility is this idea. If we use the same terms as before, businesses are making a sacrifice: the $2 million per year worker goes from 60 to 40 hours per week, and is paid $1.5 million, rather than $1 million (worker sacrifices) or $1.33 million (proportional reduction). The potential for this to benefit society, ignoring the effects that the worse possibilities mentioned above can also provide (like lower unemployment), is rooted in people working harder because they are being paid at a higher rate; or alternatively, people working harder because if they complete tasks sooner, they have more free time. Businesses benefit if people work harder, and have the option of preventing people from working less in this way if the promised efficiency gains don't materialize (including by truthful indications to workers that the business will shut down due to unprofitability if workers don't provide enough value to the company). Businesses also have a safety mechanism if giving workers more freedom to decide when tasks are done leads to people doing a worse job on tasks by spending less time on them (i.e. dishonesty): people who finish tasks earlier so they can leave work will be paid less.

Draft post with no title #2

That post from 17+ years ago hating on the word 'blog' mentions stupid thoughts about language as a useless content type. But this isn't just about language.

I broke a glass vase last night. I don't know how to pronounce the word. I was thinking, why "ee-iii-sss", and not "ah-iii-sss"? That's the word "vice". So why do we tell young people that letters have a specific pronuncation, and why has the return of 'phonics' or whatever to teach reading to a southern US state been so successful in increasing the literacy rate?

What if it's that it makes young people think that they SHOULD be able to pronounce a word? Reality: every letter combination has a somewhat arbitrary sound, which sometimes but not always is the same when one of the letters in a word, like the first, is replaced. But if people think that pronunciation SHOULD make sense, then they will try to figure out what that pronunciation is based on the letters. If they think it's arbitrary, they won't care to identify the letters in a word, because they find it hard to think that it matters; they'll just wait for a teacher or family member to tell them what the word is, and when that answer comes, they didn't need to look at the actual letters to know it. If they didn't look at the letters this time, they'll come to expect they won't need to look at the letters next time either.

A few years ago I tried to teach some younger relatives to read better with flash cards, and it didn't really work. The modification that I made towards the end (after months of very little improvement) was that if they couldn't read the word, they could say all of the letters in the word, and get credit that way. It still wasn't as engaging a method as what my third-oldest sister did, by making reading into an actual game. But it was a change that I thought of because it really seemed that the "interest in looking at and being able to identify each letter in a word" was not present, in the flashcard format with a limited number of words. I thought of it like, "what if you assume that sounds are arbitrary, like they seem to be for someone who is just starting to learn Chinese with no knowledge of radicals". Like I could have five cards that differ only in the initial letter, and due to not looking at letters, there was still sometimes trouble in reading a word just after a previous word differing only in the first letter.

Written 01 Apr 2026, published 17 Oct 2026 at 20:14.

Draft post with no title #1

I've been thinking in the past few days about scaling in PvP. My suggestion for the ideal level scaling for a game was one where there was no scaling for PvP, so that "the numbers actually mean something".

But maybe exponential power inflation is unavoidable. Even if it's just 30% per expansion, which would be ~10% for three raid tiers, with 10 expansions that's still 14 times the original power. Even with just linear power scaling, 10 expansions from lvl 60 to lvl 160 would be 2.7 times the original power, and the tooltips for Season of Discovery in Classic WoW showed that WoW has always had a quadratic component to power scaling, to make the power increase going from lvl 59 to 60 somewhat more than 1.7%.

Definitely seems like games can do better than the 'everything is always your level', seen in retail WoW during leveling and in other games that I don't really care about and so won't mention. (During my military training in 2006, my roommate played an Elder Scrolls game that I think had this kind of level scaling.)

That is: an apparent increase in power by X% from gaining one level can manifest as an actual increase in power for 'same-level' mobs that a player is expected to be fighting, while being a lower percent or even 0% when fighting mobs outside of that level range. This suggestion that I made:

Level-scale mobs so they are always green-con, never gray

I don't think this is the best solution myself, but let's see how it does in votes compared to the survey question about retail-type level scaling.

Don't scale mobs that are above the player's level. Only increase the level of mobs, so that all mobs are at least green-con and award experience.

This means that at lvl 60, all mobs (except critters) would be at least lvl 48. Any mob that is above lvl 48 would be unaffected. Warlocks would be able to farm Soul Shards off of any mob.

Any level scaling has economic consequences, but let's ignore those and say that the economy (and economic incentives to kill various mobs) ends up fine.

I've been pointing out problems that result when the power difference between players is too large. And 'too large' might even be more than like, twice the health and damage. If one player has twice the health and damage of another, they can expect a 50% chance of winning even if the stronger player starts at 25% health and the other player at full.

So if you wanted to scale players in PvP, how would you do it?

It seemed like there would be a brief period, close to lvl 1, where players really would be weak; like, a 'potential strength' component, which starts at 33% at lvl 1 and increases to 100% by lvl 15 like a parabola. (Math is like X*(2-X/15)+7.5.) Then you would just restrict the power difference, to like three times as strong. A lvl 150 character would be three times as strong as a lvl 15 character. A lvl 100 character would also be three times as strong, and so would a lvl 50 character. The lvl 150 and 100 characters would be three times as strong as a lvl 35 character, but the lvl 50 character would only be 1.5 times as strong, depending on how the scaling works and how much is 'raw stats' and how much is combat biases like resist and miss rates when fighting higher levels.

You also have to ask, "what if one lvl 150 character has four times the raw stats of another lvl 150 character due to out-of-control power scaling? What happens if those characters fight? What if they both fight the same lvl 15 character?"

But anyway, this post is about a different issue. Apparently retail WoW has a class that passively heals 20% of its HP every five seconds or something. This is about why such mechanics are bad.

Not just unrealistic and stupid; not a 'roleplaying' type of mechanic. Bad for gameplay. Conservation of Ninjutsu: the more ninjas (or plural ninja, like "seven samurai") there are, the weaker each of them is. Players would like for fighting one opponent to provide a reasonable amount of challenge, but also like to try difficult things, and so would like for fighting three opponents to not be an impossible challenge.

"Regenerating 20% HP every five seconds" is like reducing total incoming rate of damage, which scales linearly with opponents. If it cancels half of the damage of one opponent (in Rav's video about endgame retail WoW, it healed all of the damage he did in an interval), it's like a 50% damage reduction against one opponent, but just a 17% damage reduction against three opponents or a 10% reduction against five opponents. It makes fighting more opponents even harder than Lanchester's laws would dictate, which say that fighting five opponents should be about 25 times as hard as one. (It could also be analyzed as 5+4+3+2+1 = 15 times as hard, with no heals or crowd-control like stuns on either side.)

Sort of like the armor mechanics in Aion: armor subtracted from damage, rather than reducing it multiplicatively. So if my cleric's armor reduced damage by 40, and one opponent had 200 attack and another had 80 attack, my armor reduced one attack to 160 (20% reduction) and the other to 40 (50% reduction). Making the easy fight even easier, but not affecting the hard fight much. This is why I wore cloth armor: I valued the outcome of a bunch of low-level characters being able to kill me (I saw this as a good thing) more than I valued a slight increase in my survivability against a strong opponent.

Good mechanics should work the opposite: provide less benefit against an already-weak opponent than against a strong opponent.

WoW has always had healing-over-time spells, like Renew. In combat they act somewhat similar to the "regenerate 20% HP every five seconds", in that they seem less effective against many enemies, but using them was a choice that cost mana. In 1v1 combat, these HoTs could sometimes provide little real benefit, compared to using the mana for immediate heals. The benefit in Classic is often just that Renew is instant, so it means 1.5 seconds that can be used to run in a certain direction (whether or not combat is occurring), potentially 1.5 seconds more of mana regen if no further spells are cast, and the cast cannot be interrupted the way Flash Heal can be if used in combat. The mana efficiency is similar, though Renew might be a little better if talented; and mana is the real limiter in many situations. Being able to use Shadow Word: Pain on multiple enemies is an example of mechanics that make fighting multiple enemies easier, not harder, at least until the priest's mana runs out while most enemies are still at half health.

Written 01 Apr 2026, published 17 Oct 2026 at 20:12.